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In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named "Nim Chimpsky" in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim's teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed--not because Nim couldn't create sentences but because he couldn't even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where language comes from. In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child's first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim's inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.
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WHY CHIMPANZEES CAN’T LEARN LANGUAGE AND ONLY HUMANS CAN
LEONARD HASTINGS SCHOFF MEMORIAL LECTURES
UNIVERSITY SEMINARS LEONARD HASTINGS SCHOFF MEMORIAL LECTURES The University Seminars at Columbia University sponsor an annual series of lectures, with the support of the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Fund. A member of the Columbia faculty is invited to deliver before a general audience three lectures on a topic of his or her choosing. Columbia University Press publishes the lectures. Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy 1996 Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization 1996 David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain 1999 Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust 2003 Lisa Anderson, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century 2003 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World 2004 David Rosand, The Invention of Painting in America 2004 George Rupp, Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community 2006 Lesley A. Sharp, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer 2007 Robert W. Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto 2010 Boris Gasparov, Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents 2012 Douglas A. Chalmers, Reforming Democracies: Six Facts About Politics That Demand a New Agenda 2013 Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach 2013 Robert L. Belknap, Plots 2016 Paige West, Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea 2016 Annette Insdorf, Cinematic Overtures, 2017
WHY CHIMPANZEES CAN’T LEARN LANGUAGE AND ONLY HUMANS CAN
HERBERT S. TERRACE
Columbia University Press New York
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